ALTERED BODIES ARCHIVE PROJECT
(2001- Present)

Photographic Video and Audio Archive

Altered Bodies is an ongoing archive project. Made up of interviews with people who have chosen to use medical and nonmedical procedures to alter their bodies. The interviews show various ways bodies are regulated and how individuals enter into and disrupt normalizing discourses.

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Qualia is a video installation with two unique videos that are looped, synchronized, and projected opposite one another.
         The piece chronicles my personal sensorial experiences during treatment following the sudden onset of epileptic seizures in October 2002.  Transitioning between anticonvulsants, I began to have ‘psychotic’ reactions that made me feel as if my mind split in two. The idea of mirroring images to reflect exterior and interior realities grew out of this experience. Using the concept of a fun house mirror and story of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the image projected on one screen is distorted and conceptually transformed on the opposite screen, reflecting my altered mental states.
         Through performances for the camera, editing and sound effects, the piece shares my roller-coaster ride of reactions to medical treatments that ranged from outer body experiences and panic attacks, to hallucinations and psychosis. The reenactments reveal my inner experience, or “qualia”, a concept explored by neurologists to better understand mental health. Later I developed this piece into a narrative video, Qualia Diaries, to locate the experience historically and medically.

Image is the business of a beauty company, but the profession's attachment to the surface and aesthetic is not merely a facade, it penetrates many layer of the workplace. By engaging with people from every department of a beauty products manufacturing and distribution company, Players' Ladder temporarily subverts the partitioned workplace to reveal it's collective concepts of success and failure.